It Could Happen Here - The Effective Altruism Scam

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

We sit down to talk about the charity scam your least favorite billionaires love.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Boy, what a glorious introduction that was. Let me also introduce some human beings who you might know first we have chris and and we have james uh our our our correspondents in the field uh joining us today also is james's spanish civil war era mozen nagant yep that's right yeah i'm very happy that he's joining us he's going to make contributions throughout the throughout the episode just gonna it's a it's an antique bolt action rifle served in three world wars counting the current one that's right yep and it's about to uh it's about to kick off uh yeah this one now which uh it might it might be it might be two in the l column for the most in the gun. Yeah, it's served a mixed bag. Yep.

Anyway, we're recording this the day of the elections, so everybody's having a horrible one. I'm having a firearm. Yeah, yeah, I did. I'm still hoping my Tech 9 comes in before Oregon votes on its next ballot measure. Anyway, today I wanted to talk a little bit about something that I've been thinking about charitable giving that Elon Musk in particular has recently highlighted as how he thinks about things. It's very popular with the billionaire set who are deeply invested in getting people to think that they're saving the world, right? The folks who want to be seen as like looking ahead and protecting the future of mankind and saving the world,

but not doing it through things like paying more taxes and supporting less money being in politics and all that kind of jazz, like not anything that would actually harm their personal ability to exercise power. So it's gotten kind of attacked recently because it's associated with guys like Musk and because he is markedly less popular now than he was, let's say, 10 years ago. But I wanted to talk about- 44 billion dollars ago. Yeah, I wanted to talk because effective altruism, which is an actual movement, there's like organizations that espouse this.

There's hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable giving that gets handed out under the aegis of effective altruism. And as a heads up, like most of it's fine, like most of its charities to like get let out of water and stuff. Like it's not like effective altruism is not comprehensively some sort of scam by the wealthy. It's more of an honest theory about how charitable giving ought to work that has been adopted by the hyper-wealthiest justification for fucked up shit and married to something called long-termism, which we will be talking about in a little bit. But I want to talk about where the concept of effective altruism comes from. If you read articles about this thing, most people who study it will say that it kind of this got started as a modern movement in 1971 with an Australian philosopher named Peter Singer. And Singer wrote an article titled Famine, Affluence and Morality.

I think it was actually published in 1972. I don't know. One of the two, 71 or 72. And the essay basically argued that there's no difference morally between your obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house. Like if a dude gets hit by a car in front of your house, you are not more morally obligated to help him than you are morally obligated to help people who are dying in Syria. to help people who are dying in Syria, you know? And obviously, like, there's a version of truth to that, which is that we're all responsible for each other and internationalism is the only actual path away from the nightmare. And when we do things like ignore authoritarians massacring their people, it inevitably comes

back to affect us and like fuel the growth of an authoritarian nightmare domestically. That is very true. But also, there's a fundamental silliness in it, because one reason why there is a moral difference between helping a person dying in the street in front of you and somebody who's in danger in, I don't know, southern China, is that like, you can immediately help the person in front of your house, right? Like if somebody gets hit, you have the ability to immediately render life-saving aid. It's actually quite difficult to help somebody who is, for example, getting shot at by the government in Tibet, right? Like,

not that you don't have a moral responsibility to that person, but your moral responsibility to actually immediately take action when somebody is bleeding out is higher than your responsibility to try to figure out how to help people in distant parts of the globe. This is more nuanced than I think a lot of, especially like rich assholes like to, it's more nuanced than like the, I shouldn't say rich assholes. What's the problem with this is that it's the this is the kind of revelation like when you start talking this way that that feeds really well into a fucking ted talk it it it's a perfect fix for that morality whereas the reality is like a lot more nuanced where and number one it's also like well that the kind of help that you would render to somebody who's been hit by a car in front of your house is very different and requires really different resources than the kind of help you would give people in, say, again, like Syria, who are being

murdered by their government, right? If somebody gets hit by a car in front of your house, you run out with a fucking tourniquet and a bleed kit and you call 911, right? Those are the resources that you can immediately use. If Bashar al-Assad is firing poison gas at protesters in Aleppo, well, your stop the bleed kit is not going to help with that one way or the other, right? A very different set of resources are necessary. So it's foolish to compare them. Anyway, Singer did, and his essay was a big hit. It's often called like a sleeper hit for young people who were kind of getting into the, you know, the charity industrial complex, or at least were considering it.

Now, I found an interview with a woman named Julia Wise, who currently works at the Center for Effective Altruism. And she was a started out as a social work, like to give you an idea of the kind of people who got into this. When she read Weiss's article, she was a, uh, uh, started out as a social work, like to give you an idea of the kind of people who got into this, when she read Weiss's article, um, she was a social worker. She kind of fell in love with the concept. And when it started becoming a thing in like the seventies and eighties, uh, it was,

as she described quote, a bunch of philosophers and their friends, and nobody had a bunch of money. So it was also more when singer put it out, kind of a, a wave, like a way of people kind of debating how to think about charity, which is fine. People should always be like exploring stuff like that. So it's not I don't want to be like going after Singer to well,

I do a little bit because Singer, after kind of his movement has a couple of decades to grow, Singer, after kind of his movement has a couple of decades to grow, winds up doing a TED talk and the TED talk winds up kind of electrifying a very specific chunk of the American techno set. And you can see kind of in in some of the writing on this, like the way in which his talking about sort of the morality of charity has gotten flattened over the years, quote, which is the better thing to do to provide a guide dog to one blind American or cure 2000 people of blindness in developing countries. Um, which is like,

I don't know both there's resources to do both. Um, we, again, if you, for example, in the United States were to tax the billionaire class and corporations a lot more, you could provide that blind person in the United States with free health care in a way that many countries do. And we could also continue or even expand charitable giving.

Maybe if we were to do stuff like spend less money on our military. Again, it's like a false choice. Again, it's like a false choice. Like it's worth – but of course it's because the reason this choice is there is because they're thinking about helping people purely in the form of like noblest oblige charity, right? They're thinking about periods like rich – like things that get improved when rich people put money into them. So obviously we should help one of these groups before the other because it's more effective and yada yada yada yeah yeah well and i think i think that was one of the things that like there's a second way you can look at the original sort of problem of we have the same ethical responsibility of someone who gets hit by a car or someone's on the other side of the world is that

like the other way you can look at that is like i don't care about what's happening to someone on the other side of the world so i don't have to care about this person to get hit by a car and that seems like yeah these people are doing it's like well i don't really have to care about this person here because there's someone over there yeah i didn't like i can see like how this lines up with some of these like like bigger like meta-ethical kind of perspectives on what equality is and what like your ethical obligations are but then yeah it seems to just kind of be like a very clear like very clear slippery slope to making kind of malthusian excuses for doing fuck all right that that's that's where the story is heading so oh good Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

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and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. early 2000s he does like a ted talk you know the the momentum around this idea starts to build and it really gets a shot in the arm in 2013 with the work of an author named eric friedman uh friedman's new book or friedman's book at the time that was new was called reinventing philanthropy a framework for more effective giving. And he kind of, he kind of extends the arguments that singer is making. One of the things that he does is he,

he contrasts what St. Jude's children's research hospitals are doing to like research children's medical or like, like illnesses that, that kids suffer and treatments for them with the Malagi provincial hospital in Angola. And he kind of contrasts two patients who are being served at the different hospitals

for life-threatening conditions and concludes, quote, I'd probably also be very angry at the donors who are continually funding St. Jude and leaving Malagi Provincial woefully under-resourced. Why are the patients of St. Jude so much more worthy of life? And like, yeah. What a ridiculous way to think about a children's hospital. Fucking asinine.

And the fact that many of the people who are doing these fucking TED Talks and contributing to this global tech class are the same people who are making fucking millions of dollars off the pharmaceutical industry, which continues to neglect the diseases that people in the colonial periphery suffer from because there's no profit in selling them drugs and instead you're selling bald and askew as to people in america right like yes we can i mean like you you you could if we just if if every single person who had a who's gotten a ted talk had all of their wealth

expropriated tomorrow we could fund both of these hospitals. Exactly. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah. The world would be better. It's fundamentally a kind of obscenity to look at pharmaceutical companies, CEOs, making hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, selling people off in literal poison and jacking up the price of things like insulin, to look at these tech CEOs

accumulating tens of billions of dollars and to say, donations to this children's hospital are robbing an Angolan hospital. So I won't be paying my taxes. Yeah. Why don't you go fuck yourself? Yeah.

And anyway, like, but this is like, you can see who this appeals to, right? If you've like the kind of people who love the freakonomics books which are bullshit regressive bad statistics bad statistics can i can i tell one economic story please yeah okay so one of my professors at u chicago was a political science guy um or i guess he's public policy and there's there's a thing there's a thing the freakonomics guy wrote where he was trying to prove that money doesn't actually influence uh like doesn't actually influence elections yes yeah one of his real bangers yeah and and you know what my my my my professor wrote wrote a paper about that which is that you know again this is a perfect example of how dumb this

guy is that he doesn't this is how economists think right like they they when they go into a field they go in thinking they already know everything and they can prove sort of whatever they want because the thing this guy doesn't understand, right. Is that like, and this is the thing most people in the U S do not understand about how Congress works is that like all of the shit that's happening on the floor of Congress, all of those votes, that is not, that is not real Congress, right? That, that is fake Congress. Nothing, nothing important to actually happens there. All of the important stuff in Congress happens in committees. And so you can't figure out whether money is doing anything by measuring its effect on, like, votes on the floor because floor votes are bullshit. All of the important stuff has already – by the time a floor vote happens, all of the important political stuff has already happened. And so he did this whole thing where he was – he had, he had this great, I, I, he had this great metric called like, uh, Oh God. And it was,

it was called like, like the, the, the, the, the, the dairy cow coefficients, which is like measuring like how,

how someone should vote versus like how many dairy cows ran. It turns out, you know, if you look at what these people do in committee, no, yeah. Hey, look,

it turns out lobbying money is unbelievably effective, but because this fucking guy had like and this is something that like like this sort of distinction between between congress like on the floor and congress and committee like there's a president whose name i'm forgetting who has this famous line that like congress and committee is congress at work congress on the floor is congress at play or something like that like it's like this is just like basic shit that if you know literally anything about how a field works, you cannot do the thing the Freakonomics guy does. If you want a good breakdown of why the Freakonomics guy is full of shit, Michael Hobbs and Peter Shamshiri, I think is his last name, have a new podcast called If Books Could Kill.

And they break down with like citations and everything like why everything in that book is horseshit but like the reason why it's the only thing i'll disagree with you on chris is i don't think he's an idiot i think he's very intelligent and i think the thing that he's smart to do is he recognizes that there's a specific type of person and engineers and programmers are very likely to be this type of person who kind of fundamentally like they're oppositional defiant. If somebody, if something, if people say like,

well, this is good or this is bad, they're going to take the, want to take the opposite stance. And if you can provide them a way to like, feel like they're enlightened and smart and actually looking at the data by doing it, then they'll take the opposite stance on stuff. Like it's bad to let people buy elections or it's good to fund children's

hospitals just because somebody's made them feel smart for being an asshole um that's what the freakonomics guy does malcolm gladwell does a subtler version of it as a general rule um and that's what that's what that fucking friedman is doing in this this in 2013. I found a good review of it in the Stanford Social Innovation Review that is pretty scathing, like surprisingly scathing considering it's written by a bunch of like Stanford nerds. This approach amounts to little more than charitable imperialism, whereby my just cause is just and yours to one degree or another is a waste of precious resources. This approach is not informed giving. And I think that that does a pretty good job of summarizing what I think is fucked up about it.

There's another thing that's really messed up, which is that one of the conclusions that they come to here is that um they don't recommend or there's an organization called give well that kind of gets gets formed as a result of the book friedman writes and they recommend not to deliver like not to donate money to disaster assistance in the wake of the japanese tsunami um and oppose disaster relief donations in general um because quote and this is from friedman most of those killed by disasters could not have been saved by donations um which is number one like that's the the donations are about like rebuilding communities generally it's not like about the saving lives usually it's about like well all of the infrastructure was destroyed and it must be rebuilt um but okay guy well it's

annoying too because it's like it's it's not like there's not good critiques of like specifically always like the red cross oh it's all fucked up the every yes i yeah but their critique is like the worst possible like yeah the actual critiques are that every single large charitable organization is fucked up and if you go and talk to people on the ground they will bitch like if you go to fucking war zones, people bitch more about NGOs than the folks shooting at them half the time. Yeah. Yeah. They bitch about it being inefficient, about the stuff they're given being like bad quality or like like nonsense, like just being handed out to be handed out, which is a thing that happens sometimes.

And they bitch about well-paid aid workers staying in hotels and showing up for a couple of hours to like do a photo op um yeah there's also more incisive like you know that's not to say none of it's useful like for example as many complaints as people have everyone i've known who has been in a place where medicine sans frontier slash doctors without borders has operated while they have complaints about doctors without borders are like it's good that there's more doctors here we fucking need them um and you know it's like unhcr plenty of things to complain about unhcr at every refugee camp i go to also people have fucking water filters and tents and shit because of unhcr which isn't nothing it's a damn sight more than nothing and it's a damn sight more than any of these long-termist motherfuckers are doing for people who are i don't know displaced

by war yeah and it like i some of the things that they're doing is like this is very strange kind of attempt to calculate and create markets for human life and human suffering right which you see a lot if you work like i've worked in non-profit i've worked in in disaster response i've seen some of these things on the ground and it it you see these bizarre fucking decisions being made by by someone in an office who has likely never been on the ground of these situations and it inevitably results in it's within these big organizations like the red cross and msf but but also on a governmental level, right? With people not having the autonomy to respond

in a situation to reduce human suffering and instead to be told to do something which is supposedly evidence-based based on someone who's looked at the wrong criteria and come to the wrong conclusion hundreds of miles away. And it's incredibly fucking careless. It's bureaucrats, right? And it's like we've somehow managed to create like the absolute worst possible nightmare system of you have a bunch of government bureaucrats.

And then you also have a bunch of sort of privates. We have like different – we're watching a collision of different kinds of private sector bureaucrats. Like you have your sort of NGO bureaucrats. You have – and then you have these billionaires who are also just fucking bureaucrats. you have your sort of NGO bureaucrats, you have, and then, you know,

and then you have these billionaires who are also just fucking bureaucrats and all of them are just doing box ticking. And we get like just the absolute worst nightmare fusion of horrible bureaucracy and capitalism, which is a great way to run programs to have people not die. And like so much of this comes from what that, the whole like Freakonomics thing to me strikes me as like, we didn't, like you said, reading the Wikipedia article about a subject

and then applying, trying to find out where you can apply a market to it and then posting that as the solution. It's tough. We have, the episodes we're dropping on Bastards, well, the week before this episode will air, are about like why the rent is so damn high. And one of the complaints I have is that there's a specific class of media people

who the only answer they will accept is because there's not enough class of media people who the only answer they will accept is because uh there's not enough multi-family zoning which is just a part of why the rent is so damn high and reducing it to just that ignores um the price fixing software that tens of millions of americans uh like landlords use um it ignores shit like airbnb it ignores like the fucking problems in the construction industry the lingering effects of the 2008 crash. It's very frustrating. And it's these kind of like Freakonomics guys like to do the same thing.

Like the fucking Freakonomics dude in particular, one of the things he got famous for is being like, you know, the drop in crime in the 90s. This unprecedented fall in crime was due to abortion, which zero, I will say again, zero people who are experts on the topic of crime in the 90s this unprecedented fallen crime was due to abortion which zero i will say again zero people who are experts on the topic of crime in america agree with what they will say is actually there's a shitload of different things that contributed to the declining crime and there's a good chance that abortion had an impact uh a bigger impact was probably getting the lead out of like reducing environmental lead although that gets overstated too there's all sorts of different shit including like air conditioning just the fact that like yeah yeah now more people have air conditioning and guess when violence is highest in the summer when people are stuck

around each other outside and like all sorts of computer games computer games don't people doing crimes because they've got something else to do but it's it you want to if you're going to be doing the kind of like if you're going to be doing ted talk fucking uh public works philosophy then it helps to just be able to like make one big malcolm gladwell style fucking reveal anyway that's how all these people exist and how all of their morality is informed after 2013 friedman uh is kind of like followed up by this guy named williamaskill, who was currently the he's a Scottish philosopher, which God, it's easy to get called a philosopher these days. And he is he is a personal friend of Elon Musk. When Musk's text messages got released as part of that court filing,

some of them were with McCaskill, who was considering like putting a bunch of money into buying Twitter, they ultimately decided not to to and i think because they just like it seems like mccaskill just didn't trust that musk had any sort of plan so he is i will say this not an idiot um but he's wrong in ways that are are deeply fucked up and he wrote a book that is currently a bestseller it was published in august called what we owe Future. And the gist of this is that it's merging this kind of effective altruism with what's called long-termism, which is this argument that morally, we have to consider the impact of our actions as not just on people alive today, but in future people, which is fine. There's actually a lot to that idea. But the way it always works out is we

can't pay attention to problems that people are suffering. Now we have to we have to work on saving the world from these bigger problems. And again, it's almost it's almost exclusively used as an argument for guys like Musk to like, well, we shouldn't tax billionaires out of existence, because I you know, I this that with clarity the problems that we face and the long-term solution is for me to be able to push for these specific things that i think are the only way to save humanity right i'm getting ahead of myself a little bit here let's talk about mccaskill again um when he was at oxford he's an oxford boy james uh look at we've had some bangers yeah uh he started a group called Giving What We Can in 2009,

and members were supposed to give away 10% of what they earned to the most cost-effective charities possible, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that idea, basically. And it was supposed to be basically a lifelong promise that we're all – because you assume Oxford people, a lot of them are going to wind up making very good money. As we move into our careers, this will be a more and more influential kind of giving um but yeah they'd drop the ball if they'd have me there but yeah those meetings might have gone a little bit different yeah living in his car yeah over time

though he's kind of moved into he's merged this and and again the whole effective altruism movement but different living in his car. Yeah. Over time though, he's kind of moved into, he's merged this. And, and again, the whole effective altruism movement, a lot of it does start reasonably with people being like, are these charities we're donating to working?

How can we make sure they're effective? Like what can we do to make giving work better, which is again, perfectly fine, but it very quickly gets married to this kind of long-termist thinking. And they focus instead of stuff like, for example, funding hospitals, stuff like preventing an artificial intelligence from killing everybody or like sending people to distant planets,

which are like cool and sci-fi and everything, but also deeply unrealistic. I'll say it right now. Our threat is not that an ai kills us all there's certainly a threat that different kind of artificial intelligences are used by authoritarians to make life worse for everybody but by the way peter teal is a big backer of effective altruism he's one of the people building that fucking ai um this is the guy who wrote that thing about earning to give right like that he was like this is the guy who wrote that thing about earning to give, right? Like that he was like, this is the guy who did that. Yeah.

Okay. I'm familiar with this. He's made like a promise to never take more than $31,000 or something in income over the course of a year in his life and give everything else to charity. He gives all his book profits to charity, but he also runs an organization that is spending more and more on keeping its people comfortable because I guess he doesn't have the money personally to spend anyway i think there's some sketchy shit there yeah this whole idea and i'm sure we're going to get to this right like it it it completely overlooks our obligation morally to agitate for structural change right like it says like if you can become

a billionaire through whatever bullshit evil fucking exploitative grift you can, and they give 90% of that away, you're still perpetuating a system in which one grifter gets rich and thousands of people die without fucking clean water. But that's okay because you also donated some water filters or whatever. Like, and it's not okay. And it makes me very angry actually.

Yeah. Yeah. It makes me angry too. And it's one of those things. If you look at like, here's all the charities that McCaskill and his organization are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into. They're not all bad. A lot of them are good.

And I'm glad that money is going there. But there's always this strain of deeply unsettling logic running through it. Now, I want to quote from a Time article that I think kind of gets in a very subtle way has this guy's number. When I start thinking in practice, if you've got some things that look robustly good in both the short and the long term, that definitely makes you feel a lot better about something that is only good from a very long-term perspective, he says. This year, for example, he personally donated to the Lead Exposure Elimination Project, which aims to end childhood lead exposure,

and the Atlas Fellowship, which supports talented high school students around the world to work on pressing problems. Not all issues are equally tractable, but McCaskill still cares about a range. When we met in Oxford, he expressed concern for the ongoing political crisis in Sri Lanka, though admitted he probably wouldn't tweet about it. The answer, he believes, is to be honest about it.

In philanthropy, big donors typically choose causes based on their personal passions, an ultra-subjectivist approach, McCaskill says, where everything is seemingly justifiable on the basis of doing some good. He doesn't think that's tenable. If you can save someone from drowning or ten people from dying in a burning building, what should you do, he proposes. It is not a morally appropriate response to say, well, I'm particularly passionate about drowning, so I'm going to save one person from drowning rather than the ten people from burning. And that's exactly the situation we find ourselves in and like no it is not that is

nonsense because among other things if you're a random person uh and you have a choice between saving someone from drowning or 10 people from dying in a burning building well you actually probably don't because saving people from drowning is a really difficult technical skill which is why people usually die when they try to rescue other folks who are drowning yeah the guy the creator of yugioh died trying to save a guy from drowning it's really hard and dangerous and also so is rescuing people from a burning building which is why we have firefighters and guess what a lot of firefighters may not be very good at saving people from drowning because they have not trained for that. They are different skills. These are both problems, but they're different skills.

But what if you instead spent that time buying some Tesla stocks and then you sold them and instead invested in, I don't know, something that stops water from drowning people? It's bullshit. None of the problems we have are, none of the problems, I'm going to say right now, 0% of the problems we have are the result of some sort of

lifeguard firefighter standing in between a burning building and a yacht race gone wrong and going, oh god, no! Yeah, it's like he's doing the trolley problem. He's just trying to do the trolley problem. Welcome. I'm Danny Threl.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHe Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters. To bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. ¡Suscríbete al canal! Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, música, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game.

If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo

actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

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Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace,

wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast it's funny that he's talking about sri lanka too because it's like this is the perfect example this

is the perfect example of a political crisis that is like completely intractable to all of these like none of these people donating to charities can like do literally anything about that because that's actually you know like this like the crisis of sri lanka is a is a is a both both it's a like it is but it's both a sort of short-term crisis of this like you know like utterly horrific genocidal political elite and then also a sort of long-term crisis about like the sort of structural position of like specific countries and sort of the, the like global colonial system. This is not something any of these people can solve.

The only, the only thing, the only way any of these people could solve this is if the people of Sri Lanka, like just expropriated them. Yeah. But you know, but because,

because, because, because, because these people like, because Sri Lankans do not have access to this guy and like six guns, right. There's no, there's no way, you know, he can just sort of sit there in his chair going, well, it's a crisis. I'm going to tweet about it.

I'm not going to tweet about it. He's not going to tweet about it. I can tweet about it. Yeah, I will simply talk to newspapers about it instead of tweeting. What I would say is that like here's the actual solution to the stupid problem this guy came up with. solution to the stupid problem this guy came up with well if we were to tax all of the billionaires to the point that they weren't billionaires and then put that into a massive new like works progress fund that instead of like just building national parks provided like rental assistance to millions of americans in exchange for them learning how to fight fires and getting basic

life-saving care and getting trained in things like that so that they could deal with the consequences of climate change and be able to protect their communities effectively and be incentivized to gain the actual technical skills that would allow them to protect people, well, then you would have more people capable of saving someone from a burning building or from drowning. But anyway, whatever. That's my pie-in-the the sky leftist solution to that is use funds taken from the rich in order to incentivize people to gain the skills that will allow them to protect their communities in the event of disasters.

Anyway, whatever. So over the last decade, all of this thinking has increasingly given way from a wonky theory on charitable giving by big hearted, guilt ridden millennial kids. And that's that's how this guy is always framed in articles. McCaskill is he's like, in fact, I'm going to fucking I'm going to scroll down here to my notes and I'm going to find the section of the article to show you the way he gets fucking talked about in all of these. Quote, 13 years ago, William McCaskill found himself standing in the aisle of a grocery store agonizing over which breakfast cereal to buy if he switched to a cheaper brand for a year could he put aside enough money to save someone's life like that's the yeah the sort of thoughts that you have when your engagement with global poverty is in the fucking cheerios aisle exactly exactly yeah of waitrose in Oxford, I'm sure.

Like, no, fuck off. Sorry, I'm so fucking angry at this shit. And it's clearly, very clearly, I can see that this is going towards an excuse for incredibly wealthy people paying fuck all in taxes because they claim that that's not an efficient way to do things and they completely ignore all these structural things which have to exist for their effective altruism to occur

in the first place right yeah it's um anyway this is effectively like over the years given away from this again kind of this wonky theory by guilty millennial kids to this pop philosophy for the fintech set because that's how these guilt-ridden millennial kids wound up making a bunch of money um and yeah that Time article gives, like, I just want to read another quote from it about one of the other guys who's involved in putting a lot of money into McCaskill's organization. Quote, Mr. Bankman-Fried makes his donations

through the FTX Foundation, which has given away 140 million, of which 90 million has gone through the group's future fund towards long-term causes. Mr. McCaskill and Mr. Bankman-Fried's relationship is an important piece in understanding the community's evolution in recent years. The two men first met in 2012 when Mr. Bankman-Fried was a student at MIT with an interest in utilitarian philosophy. Over lunch, Mr. Bankman-Fried said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. Mr. McCaskill suggested he might do more good by entering a high-earning field

and donating money to the cause than by working for it directly. Mr. Bankman-Fried contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance. They opted for the money,

and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019. First off, that guy absolutely did not call any charities. Sorry, this was from the Forbes article I used, not the Time article. First off, I don't believe that he called. But if he did, it was something like, hey, I don't have any skills or training. Do you want money or do you want me to volunteer?

And they were like, who the fuck is this kid? Like, we don't need another asshole wandering around here trying to touch the cats. Send us your check. Yeah, and so instead of, I don't know, getting trained as a vet tech or something where he would actually be able to help animals, he founded a cryptocurrency exchange

and contributed to the burning of massive amounts of carbon that will contribute to mass deforestation and the deaths of animals around the world that's good i think that there's another aspect of this which i think is sort of underexplored which is that utilitarianism is genuinely one of the greatest evils humanity has ever created every every bad decision anyone has ever made if you look behind it you can find utilitarianism like it's the basis the basis of all new classical economics it's horrible awful shit everything bad in the world it is utilitarianism it is an engine that allows rich people to feel good about hurting poor people that's that's what it is but and that's what i think this all makes clear so the actual rhetoric from these people is always

like it's especially if you're just kind of encountering it out in the wild it's hard to argue with a lot of the time because they'll be like, well, look, we need to look at what's going to help the most people. And that's why we're setting up none of this matters if we don't deal with this problem or that problem. And it's tailor made to sound profound. And again, in like a TED talk or the website for some charitable giving organization aimed at getting you to like put 10% of your income to long termist causes. But again, the fucked up shit crusts kind of around the edges for the most part in lines like these from a time profile on McCaskill. The first public protest against African-American slavery

was the 1688 Germantown Quaker petition. Slavery was only abolished in the British Empire in 1833, decades later in the US and not until 1962 in Saudi Arabia, history encourages McCaskill to favor gradual progress over revolution. Abolition, he says is maybe the single best moral change ever. It's certainly up there with feminism and they're extremely incremental. They don't seem that way because we enormously shrink the past,

but it's almost 300 years. We're talking about, um, that wasn't the result of incremental change. It was the result against the people who own slaves fighting viciously against any attempts to end slavery. Like, yeah, it was a it was a battle. It was a series of, in fact, a series of revolutions in a lot of cases, including like the Haitian Revolution and guys like John Brown. There were a shit bleeding Kansas.

There were a shitload of people died fighting in order to end slavery. Like, the Civil War, dude! What do you call that? That's not incremental. A million people shot each other to death. You know, and it's, as far as we can talk about sort of incremental progress, it's stuff like, okay, so the, like, the slaves in

Haiti freed themselves by means of revolution and then sent a bunch of guns and weapons to people in Latin America so that their armies could march through latin america and end slavery like many revolutions had to occur to end slavery because it was a powerful system at the center of global capital that a lot of entrenched and heavily armed interests were willing to die to maintain which also is fun because i bet i bet i bet if you look through these people's supply chains and this is almost certainly true of elon musk supply chains like i mean okay musk supply chains in china you can have some kind of debate as to whether the kinds of forced

labor you're going to be encountering are slavery like i i i bet if you look through 90 percent of people who are effective altruists you can find slavery in their supply chains and their argument will be like well i can't end slavery in my supply chain because uh i guarantee it they're all in the tech industry and like nobody has a laptop or a smartphone without the use of rare earth minerals that are yep like acquired via slavery it's it's the same thing if you're wearing clothes you have something that slavery was involved in because the garment industry slavery is literally inextricable from it like the company that has tried the hardest to remove slavery from their from their production line patagonia yeah um they still fucking continually finds like oh nope there's

some more yeah yeah they're pretty good about calling it out. But yeah, they put a lot of money into that shit. And they said it is hard. Yeah. Anyway, I'm going to read another fun quote from the Forbes article. Mr. Bankman Freed said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 or 20 years. If you're worried about existential risks of a really bad pandemic, you sort of can't stall on that, Mr. Bankman Freed said in an interview.

That is how his text messages popped up among hundreds of others sent to Mr. Musk. Mr. Bankman-Fried ultimately did not join Mr. Musk's bid. I don't know exactly what Elon's goals are going to be with Twitter, Mr. Bankman-Fried said in an interview. There was a little bit of ambiguity there. He had his hands full in the months that followed as cryptocurrency prices crashed. The Twitter deal has been volatile in its own way, with Mr. Musk trying to back out before recently announcing his intention to follow through that after all in august mr musk retreated mr mccaskill's book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation worth reading this is a close match to my philosophy so that's that's kind of the surface of where we are now um it is not It doesn't quite get at all of the things that are deeply fucked up.

And for that, I wanted to quote from another article I found on Aeon. A-E-O-N. It's an essay by... Let me get the author here because it's quite good. About long-termism. It's an essay called Against Long-Termism by Emil P. Torres, a PhD candidate at a university in Hanover in Germany, Leibniz Universitat. I don't know. I feel silly every time I try to say German, so I'm not going to try that hard. But the article

is very good, and it kind of gets at how this effective altruism movement has merged with long-termism in a way that specifically exists to buoy the interests of wealthy authoritarians around the world. Quote, this has roots in the work of Nick Bostrom, who founded the grandiosely named Future of Humanity Institute, FHI, in 2005, and Nick Beckstead, a research associate at FHI and a program officer at Open Philanthropy. It has been defended most publicly by the FHI philosopher Toby Ord, author of The Precipice, Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Long-termism is the primary research focus of both the Global Priorities Institute and an FHI-linked organization directed by Hilary Greaves and the Forethought Foundation, run by William McCaskill, who also holds positions at FHI and GPI. Adding to the tangle of titles, names, institutes, and acronyms, long-termism is one of the main cause areas of the so-called effective altruism movement, which was introduced by Ord in around

2011 and now boasts of having a mind-boggling $46 billion in committed funding. It is difficult to overstate how influential long-termism has become. Karl Marx in 1845 declared that the point of philosophy isn't merely to interpret the world, but change it. And this is exactly what long-termists have been doing, with extraordinary success. Consider that Elon Musk, who has cited and endorsed Bostrom's work, has donated $1.5 million to FHI through its sister organization, the even more grandiosely named Future of Life Institute. This was co-founded by the multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur,

Jan Talin, who, as I recently noted, doesn't believe that climate change poses an existential threat to humanity because of his adherence to the long-termist ideology. Meanwhile, the billionaire libertarian and Donald Trump supporter, Peter Thiel, who once gave the keynote address at an effective altruism conference,

has donated large sums of money to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose mission is to save humanity from superintelligent machines and is deeply intertwined with long-termist values. Other organizations, such as GPI and the Four Thought Foundation, are funding essay contests and scholarships in an effort to draw young people into the community. While it's an open secret that the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security and Emerging Technologies, CSET, aims to place long-termists within high-level U.S. government positions to shape national apology. In fact, CSET was established by Jason

Matheny, a former research assistant in FHI who's now the deputy assistant to U.S. President Joe Biden for technology and national security. Ord himself has, astonishingly for a philosopher, advised the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the U.K. Prime Minister's Office, Cabinet Office, and Government Office for Science, and he recently contributed to a report from the Secretary General of the United Nations that specifically mentions long-termism. The short answer is that elevating the fulfillment of humanity's supposed potential above all else could non-trivially increase the probability that actual people, those alive today and

in the near future, suffer extreme harms, even death. Consider, as I noted elsewhere, the long-termist ideology inclines its adherence to take an insouciant attitude towards climate change. Why? Because even if climate change causes island nations to disappear, triggers mass migrations, and kills millions of people, it probably isn't going to compromise our long-term potential over the coming trillions of years. If one takes a cosmic view of the situation, even a climate catastrophe that cuts the human population by 75% for the next two millennia will, in the grand scheme of things, be nothing more than a small blip, the equivalent of a 90-year-old man having stubbed his toe when he was two. So this is evil, right? This is vicious and vile and cruel. And it's one of those things, there's a book that I've talked about on the show a couple of times that is

quite popular called ministry of the future. And I think it's a very good book. And one of the attitude, like the basic premise of it is that climate change is addressed finally. And the worst aspects of it are dealt with and like begin to be repaired because of the establishment of an organization called the ministry of the future. It's this international organization that exists to like look out for the interests of unborn people and animals and plant species and part of how they do this is by murdering

billionaires in their beds uh and blowing up planes to end international air travel which is so there's a verse like again the, like, we should be thinking about people and living creatures who have not yet been born is reasonable. And the reasonable conclusion of that is, and so we should deal with things like climate change and stop, like, thoughtlessly degrading our environment so that people in the future will be able to live a quality life. The argument that these long-termists are making is no that's foolish because in a trillion years none of it will matter and i intend to be alive in a trillion years because i will be an immortal machine man billionaire forever you know it's the thing about these people these people fucking suck it's like a thing about this if you believe this the only literally the only thing that you should spend your time doing is trying to dismantle

every single nuclear weapon on the planet like you you should spend your time doing is trying to dismantle every single nuclear weapon on the planet. Like, you should be forming your own private armies to, like, storm military bases to destroy nukes. And none of them will ever fucking do this. All these people will back candidates who, like, want to have more nuclear weapons. All these people who will back candidates who, like, you know, I wonder how many of these people personally supported dropping a nuke in the middle of Iraq in 2004. Like, God. Yeah. how many of these people personally supported dropping a nuke in the middle of a rock in 2004 like god yeah i anyway this is probably that's probably enough i i wanted to at some point i think we will be doing a more detailed look into some of these people and a more detailed look into some maybe maybe as a bastards episode but this is just getting more relevant and i wanted to give people

i wanted to connect them with some like some some resources uh particularly that article on aeon about uh the the dangers of long-termism and uh yeah anyway be be advised this is what the fucking assholes who have spent like think about how many cool things the tech industry has actually made in the last decade it's it's not many right like it's mostly been vaporware like most of the different big apps and stuff have all are in the process of collapsing right now that's why the industry is falling apart very little value as we record this in the metaverse yeah that's right that's right without legs it's like you're sitting right next to me, James, except for you have no legs and your mouth is open in an endless wordless scream. Finally.

Anyway, that's what these assholes want to do. like the freedom out of this incredible creation and turning it into an engine for sucking your personal data out and marketing things to you and making you angry all the time as much as possible and convincing your parents and grandparents that fucking Joe Biden's been replaced by a lizard man. Like the people who did that now think that we can't take care of people today because that would distract from our mission to take care of people who have never been born a trillion years from now.

Anyway, fuck them. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories

inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, We'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything.

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